Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/249

164

The Editorial Committee of this journal has asked me to give a sketch of the Alpine Club, with a report of its progress up to April 15th of the current year. To begin before the beginning, it was foreshadowed twenty-four years ago on a clear, bracing, sunny day, when Sir Sandford Fleming, K.C.M.G., his son, S. Hall Fleming, the late Principal Grant of Queen's University, and party with pack train emerged from the slow, difficult forest trail and rested at the welcome meadow on Rogers' pass. Inspired by the glacier-mountains rising far and high about them, they resolved themselves into a Canadian Alpine Club; elected officers; passed a resolution of gratitude to Major Rogers, discoverer of the pass; proposed the conquest of the most formidable peak in the whole region; drank the Club's health in a stream sparkling at their feet; and so ended. But the incident was prophetic as well as gay and picturesque. And that the element of gaiety was in it, Sir Sandford gives evidence, when he tells how these grave and reverend seniors performed a game of leapfrog as an act of Olympic worship to the deities in the heart of the Selkirks.

Since that day on Rogers pass, the alpine idea has been stirring in the Canadian mind, faintly at first and slowly, but gradually increasing until it gathered enough momentum to be called by that potential term—a movement. In the winter of 1905-6, appeals were made privately and through the press to persons proper to the project—appeals which won a response justifying the calling of a meeting in March, when twenty-eight delegates from every part of the Dominion gathered in Winnipeg, and the movement assumed tangible form, on March 27th, Mr. A. O. Wheeler, F.R.G.S., assisted by the Rev. Dr. Herdman, gave an illustrated lecture, "The Wonderland of Canada." On the following day at noon Mr. Wheeler addressed the Canadian Club on Canadian Mountaineering, and in the afternoon the Club was formally organized, with seventy-nine members. Sir Sandford Fleming being chosen as Patron and Mr. Wheeler as President, both by hearty acclamation. The inaugural dinner followed in the evening, when some stirring speeches were made born of experiences in rare altitudes, and the healths of the King (God bless him!), the Club and its officers, were drunk with all the enthusiasm of a young mountaineering organization.

The seventy-nine members of a year ago have, up to the present date of writing, increased to two hundred. Membership is divided into five grades: Honorary, Associate, Active, Graduate and Subscribing. The first named consists of those who are eminently distinguished in mountaineering, exploration or research. Among the eight elected as honorary members of the Alpine Club of Canada, are Professor Charles E. Fay, President of the American Alpine Club; Edward Whymper and Dr. J. Norman Collie, of the English Alpine